Kirov Murder and Purges

The murder of Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, set off a
chain of events that culminated in the Great Terror of the 1930s.
Kirov was a full member of the ruling Politburo, leader of the
Leningrad party apparatus, and an influential member of the
ruling elite. His concern for the welfare of the workers in
Leningrad and his skill as an orator had earned him considerable
popularity. Some party members had even approached him secretly
with the proposal that he take over as general secretary.

It is doubtful that Kirov represented an immediate threat to
Stalin's predominance, but he did disagree with some of Stalin's
policies, and Stalin had begun to doubt the loyalty of members of
the Leningrad apparatus. In need of a pretext for launching a
broad purge, Stalin evidently decided that murdering Kirov would
be expedient. The murder was carried out by a young assassin
named Leonid Nikolaev. Recent evidence has indicated that Stalin
and the NKVD planned the crime.

Stalin then used the murder as an excuse for introducing
draconian laws against political crime and for conducting a
witch-hunt for alleged conspirators against Kirov. Over the next
four-and-a-half years, millions of innocent party members and
others were arrested -- many of them for complicity in the vast
plot that supposedly lay behind the killing of Kirov. From the
Soviet point of view, his murder was probably the crime of the
century because it paved the way for the Great Terror. Stalin
never visited Leningrad again and directed one of his most
vicious post-War purges against the city -- Russia's historic
window to the West.